Small bore rifles, such as 22 caliber rifles, commonly have an elongated tubular magazine into which cartridges can be loaded. Loading is typically accomplished manually by dropping single cartridges into the upper end of the magazine. This manual loading operation is quite time consuming.
In an effort to speed up this manual loading operation, cartridges can be preloaded in end-to-end or in-line fashion into storage tubes. Storage tubes of this type are discussed, for example, in Hoagland U.S. Pat. No. 1,085,125 and Paulson U.S. Pat. No. 1,340,737. Cartridges from the storage tube can be, in effect, poured into the tubular magazine.
One problem with storage tubes of this type is that they must be quite long in order to hold any significant number of cartridges. This makes them inconvenient to manually transport and use in the field.